


Queens Blvd Local

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Gen, Parent Tony Stark, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:20:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22994593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: Tony, Peter, Morgan, heroic urges, first-rate ice cream, and subway announcements that only people who live here can understand.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 18
Kudos: 168





	Queens Blvd Local

### Sometime during Endgame

Despite the jokes, they aren’t actually raising Morgan in a cabin in the woods. Like everyone else of a certain wealth class in NYC, they have a weekend place. A few weekend places, none in the Hamptons because the Stark-Potts wealth class is not an everyone else kind of class and Tony really hates the McDonalds-ization of the South Fork. Morgan is a child of Manhattan, jaywalking as soon as she can toddle – at least when her mother isn’t watching. 

Tony’s decision to take her out to Queens is a spur of the moment decision that’s not really all that random. Not random at all, in fact, if you look at a calendar. Peter would have been eighteen today and Tony didn’t think of him like a son and he doesn’t think of him like the brother Morgan never got to meet and that’s totally not why they are on the R train moving at a snail’s pace toward Forest Hills. 

The train is one of the talking ones Peter hated, with automated human voices putting the accents not quite where they would be from an actual human – or even a half-decent AI because the MTA’s incompetence is of a magnitude that not even Thanos could dent. The syncopated cadence of the announcements makes Morgan giggle – she can’t even speak clearly and she knows how bad it is. 

“Sexy fiff!” 

“You are too young for sexy fiffs,” he tells her firmly as they leave the 65th Street station. “Maybe when you’re thirty. Or fifty. We’ll talk about it in a few decades.” 

Morgan tilts her head and appears to consider the response, then makes the same face Pepper makes when she plans to ignore him but is kind enough not to say so aloud. 

He’s not sure what they’ll do when they get where they are going. When he figures out where they are going. May Parker has politely turned down every overture and invite and won’t want him turning up, certainly not with his daughter. His ability to appreciate that he hasn’t suffered loss on the magnitude of so many others waxes and wanes and Pepper has told him to not compare or contrast others’ losses to his own guilt for failing to stop Thanos. Which in turn waxes and wanes depending on how recently Natasha has tried to get him to talk to Rogers. 

“Hey, boo!” 

He’s startled out of his reverie and looks down at Morgan. “Yes! That’s exactly where we are,” he confirms, swallowing the lump in his throat because there’s no way to explain the déjà vu to someone in diapers. “But I think I know where we should go instead.” 

They get off at the last stop and walk through Forest Hills Gardens and down to Eddie’s Sweet Shop. He’d gone there with Peter once, pretending to be awed at the neighborhood secret that hadn’t been a secret to him at all. The kid had wanted so much to impress him and Tony remembered it as a conscious choice to not be his own father, to reward the attempt and not emphasize the failure of it. 

“My daddy took me here,” he tells his daughter over a banana split made of ice cream produced in-house. “We would go watch tennis, which is a sport only slightly less boring than golf, and then come here.”

Morgan doesn’t have grandparents and for all he knows she thinks her parents were hatched from eggs like a Pokemon. But she’s got spoons in both hands, double-fisting the strawberry and maple walnut and making a spectacular mess, and a part of him wishes she’d care but mostly he’s just delighted in her delight. 

They take the LIRR back to the city because it’s ten minutes and Morgan is both sticky and, a couple of hours past her nap, decompensating.

“They’d have gotten on like gangbusters,” Pepper tells him as she guides a tear- and strawberry-stained Morgan into the kiddie bathroom for a bath.

* * *

### Sometime between Civil War and Infinity War

They’re on the subway and Tony can’t figure out why, but Peter tells him that that’s precisely why. 

“There’s a whole other city out here,” Peter tells him as they sit on the R rolling through central Queens. “It doesn’t look like Midtown and nobody cares about it because it doesn’t have hipsters or rich people.” 

This was supposed to be a discussion about why Peter needed to put the costume away for a while, about how he was gaining enemies and there was still the Sokovia Accords to be maneuvered around and Tony’d kind of promised May Parker that he wouldn’t do anything to reduce Peter’s chances to go to the college of his choice – and that included Peter not living long enough to do so. 

Instead, they were sitting on a subway that had probably been ordered by Bob Moses and hadn’t been cleaned since Abe Beam. The announcements are indecipherable, like the conductor’s eating rocks while using the PA. The car is crowded and they might be the only white guys in it. 

“Hey, boo,” the conductor announces and Peter gestures for them to get up, balancing easily as the train jerks to a stop. It’s only when they are on the platform that Tony can see the tile mosaic “Woodhaven Boulevard” sign on the wall. They follow a crowd up the stairs and he fails to avoid getting clipped by someone’s granny cart. 

When they are up on street level, he’s appalled to see they are at a mall. 

“Seriously, Parker?” he asks, adjusting his cap and glasses. “I’m pretty sure Abercrombie & Fitch can pay for their own security.” 

“You’ll see in a second, Mister Stark,” Peter says with a touch of desperation that belies the confident words, leading them past the Cheesecake Factory windows and toward a crowded plaza barely bigger than a street corner, which is what it is. At the curb is a halal cart and Central American women selling mango slices in plastic baggies at one card table and knockoff wallets and phone cases at another, their young kids waiting not so patiently nearby. The A&F-wearing kids are all Korean. There are lots of families here, nobody speaking English, or at least unaccented English, and there are bus queues in front of the Macy’s that curl on each other like collapsing stars. 

Peter stops at the corner. “It’s not the mall thing,” he says once Tony catches up. “It’s so you can see who lives here and who has to shlep all their stuff home on mass transit because they don’t have a car. This is who really lives in New York, Mister Stark. And they deserve to feel safe even though they can’t afford rent in Manhattan, where the garbage gets collected more often and the streets are always snow-plowed and everyone knows someone who gets invited to the mayor’s parties and can tell him Not In My Backyard. This is where all that stuff ends up because nobody cares about these backyards.”

Tony’s impulse is to bridle because he doesn’t need to be lectured on civic virtue by a kid younger than some of his t-shirts. He’s aware that most of this is because he’d spent the previous few years getting the same lectures from someone old enough to be his father and his first reaction to thinking about Rogers is still white-hot rage. 

“You wargamed this out with your girlfriend, didn’t you?” he accuses, since it’s about the least nasty thing he can think of in the moment and he can’t take Rogers’s betrayal out on a kid who only wants to help him. “The Bella Abzug wannabe.” 

“What?” Peter shakes his head. “No! She’s not… I didn’t… She’s not my girlfriend.” 

His unfeigned cycling from confusion to outrage to embarrassment to distress gives Tony the impetus and time to step back and take a metaphorical deep breath and smile like he means it. 

“Then you are doing it wrong, Parker,” he says, holding up a hand to forestall more protests. “I get it. I do. You’ve got a whopping case of Outer Borough Resentment, which is [a fine Queens tradition and the ghost of John Lindsay flips you the bird for it.](https://untappedcities.com/2015/02/09/today-in-nyc-history-john-lindsays-no-good-very-bad-snowstorm-of-1969/)”

Peter glares at him and he would not be surprised if Peter already knew about Lindsay because Peter is a very particular kind of nerd. 

“Nothing you are saying is wrong,” he goes on. “Except for the part you’re not saying, which is that you have to be the one to fix everything. You aren’t and I hate to be that asshole who reminds you that you are sixteen because once upon a time I was sixteen and was very convinced that I had to be the one to fix everything, too. For far less noble reasons. 

“But because I was once that sixteen-year-old and I am now that mumblety-old guy, I am going to tell you that you are wrong just as I was. It doesn’t have to be just you.” 

There’s a half-beat between Peter hearing him shut him down and Peter hearing what he actually said.

“You have homework. You have a girl to woo. You have an internship to complete so you can get into the college of your dreams and so your Aunt May doesn’t kill me,” he goes on. “And just so you know, I fear her more than you. But the bottom line is that you don’t have to do this alone. I drafted you on to this team, so you’re stuck with it.” 

Peter lights up. “So I’m an Avenger?” 

“Don’t go that far,” Tony tells him with a frown. “Let’s just say you’re on Team Tony for now.” 

“Cool.”


End file.
